This is a primer put together by

  • Derya Akbaba, Linköping University
  • Miriah Meyer, Linköping University

and serves as supplemental material for the paper

📄 “Two Heads are Better than One”: Pair-Interviews for Visualization Derya Akbaba, Miriah Meyer. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2023 (to appear).


The insights and tips in this primer are informed from a series of reflectives questions that were sent to our colleagues (and friends) who conducted pair-interviews in their research between the years of 2019 – 2023.

You can read about the individual studies here:

📄 An interview method for engaging personal data Jimmy Moore, Pascal Goffin, Jason Wiese, Miriah Meyer.The Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 5(4): 1-28, doi:10.1145/3494964, 2021.

📄 Troubling Collaboration: Matters of Care for Visualization Design Study Derya Akbaba, Devin Lange, Michael Correll, Alexander Lex, Miriah Meyer. SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), doi:10.1145/3544548.3581168, 2023.

📄 Transitioning to a commercial dashboarding system: Socio-technical observations and opportunities. Conny Walchshofer, Vaishal Dhanoa, Marc Streit, Miriah Meyer. 2023 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS) (to appear).

📄 Here’s what you need to know about my data: Exploring expert knowledge’s role in data analysis Haihan Lin, Max Lisnic, Derya Akbaba, Miriah Meyer, Alexander Lex. Preprint, doi:10.31219/osf.io/dn32z, 2023.


Reflective Questions

The questions below are the prompts sent to our colleagues. We focused on both the mechanics of the interviews as well as the experience in order to generate this primer. Given the length of the reflective questions and our familiarity with the projects and colleagues, we encouraged bulleted answers over long prose in the form of responses.

Pre-Interview

These questions focus on the work you and your pair interviewer did before conducting interviews. Questions 1-2 focus on what you may have considered before beginning interviews. Questions 3-4 focus more on experiences right before individual interviews.

  1. Why did you decide to pair interview (v. solo interview)?
  2. Was there a specific method that you followed or drew inspiration from? If yes, what was it?
  3. Did the method sufficiently describe what you should do in a pair interview? Were there any gaps?
  4. Was there anything you were nervous about before the interviews or that you felt like you weren’t prepared for?
  5. What type of prep work did you and your pair interviewer do before an interview?

Interview

These questions focus on what happened during the interview.

  1. Did you have roles for the interviewers? If yes, what were they? Did the roles change over time and if so, how?
  2. Is there anything you wanted to prioritize in your interviews? For example, Devin and I wanted our participants to feel comfortable, so we focused on anonymity and candor.
  3. Were the interviews in person or online?
  4. How long were the interviews?
  5. How did you record the interviews?
  6. What were the ways in which you and your pair interviewer made sure you were in sync during the interview?
  7. Were there moments when you felt out of sync and why?

Post-Interview

These questions focus on how you processed notes and thoughts after individual interviews.

  1. What did you do after the interview? Did you reflect individually? Did you discuss with your pair interviewer?
  2. How did you generate transcripts? Did you share them with the participants? Did you anonymize the transcripts?
  3. Were you and your pair interviewer generally on the same page after an interview? If there were differences what types of things were they?

Interviewee Relationship

  1. What type of relationship did you have with your pair interviewer? Friend, colleague, just met (:
  2. Do you think this existing relationship (or lack of it) affected your interviews?
  3. Did pair interviewing change the relationship between you and the other person?
  4. How do you think having two interviewers changed the dynamic with the participant?

etc.

  1. What would you tell a labmate or someone else who wants to do a pair interview?
  2. When would you recommend pair interviewing over solo interviewing?
  3. Did you share supplemental material for your interview methods (aside from what you wrote in your methods section of the paper)?
  4. How was the labor divided between interviewers?
  5. Anything else?